Home on the Web

By Richard Borreca
Star-Bulletin

Friday, July 5, 1996


Grocery shopping
on the Internet

If you are looking for Spam and rice, one of the best bets last week was at Times Super Market in Kahala.

But, if you were looking for a good deal in ground beef and a dozen large eggs then Foodland at Aina Haina was the market for you.

All this and 30 other grocery staples are sampled every Wednesday by Kathy Wong, office manager at Flexnet, the state's first public access Internet provider, who dutifully punches the list into a Web page at http://aloha.com/shopping.html.

"The Hawaii Food Shopping Index is not to be used as a definitive guide on the part of the reader," the site warns you, but if you want to get a sense of Honolulu's food prices here's a relatively painless way to do it.

So far the surveyed stores include: Times at Kahala, Foodland at Aina Haina, Safeway at Manoa Shopping Center and Star Market at Kahala.

"We figured this would be a useful thing for the Internet, so much is entertainment or pap, with this you can get some use out of the Internet," she said.

She started with her own shopping list, expanded it to take requests from office staffers and Internet visitors. Now she is hoping that the supermarkets will be faxing in weekly price lists.



"Home on the Web" is a weekly Friday feature of the Star-Bulletin.
Richard Borreca can be reached by e-mail at rborreca@pixi.com



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